My morbid plan for a witty gravestone would appear to have come unstuck as Mr Baumgartner successfully flew across the Channel this morning. I still think he's utterly loopy, but I pass on my congratulations. Of course, Baumgartner is an experienced BASE jumper, and the BBC has linked to their story of four years ago when he jumped from the Christ statue in Rio. Certainly, his jump across the Channel was more of a flight than falling off the statue. It leads me to wonder whether or not there's actually a definition of 'flight', whereby one can distinguish between what is essentially moving whilst falling and purposeful flight. Am I flying if I can jump from one spot on the ground to the other?

So a Eurostar train has beaten the old mark to claim the title of fastest train in Britain by a whopping 45 mph on the new high speed rail link. More accurately, I think, is the link to the Watch and Listen section which is captioned "UK speeds have easily been surpassed elsewhere." Remarkable what we get excited about, especially as although the first section will be open by October, the second part of the link won't be completed until 2007, and because we have to share it with Europe. Now, if we had a 200+ mph train from the South West to London, I'd be interested.

Just on a break at work, and personal experience brings up a post. I've just witnessed the telephone network win over humans, as we attempted to transfer a call from one office to another. It ended up with the caller getting cut off, then magically re-appearing on the first phone. Now, on 24, the use of telephone conferencing, and holding, and transfering is used at least five times an episode without a problem. Is Jack Bauer just lucky, or do they have a really good phone system? It is all the more remarkable, of course, because their office was attacked earlier in the day. If that happened here, then I think the whole building would just collapse. However, we aren't a government agency, so it is pretty unlikely.....or are we?

Following on from Ollie's post (and I think you answered your own question. Certainly, I'm the only one who is having troubles deciding whether he is British or American. You, on the other hand, are a stubborn faux-northener, but certainly British. I'm still the only one born in the north, though.), more grammar questions - not least the overuse of brackets.

1) Is it a TV program or programme? Surely it would make sense to follow the French and use program, say, when Andrew Marr is on, and programme when it is Moira Stewart. Heck, whatever happened to Moira Stewart anyway?

2) Does one use 'a' or 'an' in front of an H? An example is in the third comment here.

Oh dear. We appear to have turned into a website of grammatical self loathing. Are we the Adrian Mole of net?

Random news article of the day: Skydiver plans Channel flight. Mr Baumgartner (from a family of tree researchers?) is obviously no stranger to odd feats or dangerous attempts. He is, after all, a BASE jumper. I once watched a programme about BASE jumpers on ITV, probably when it replaced Thunder in Paradise or World of Wonder (hosted by either Michael Dorn or some American Chinese Woman) as my stock Saturday afternoon childhood viewing. All I can remember is that they showed a man jumping from the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, which as the website helpfully points out, is the "world's highest suspension bridge." I had been there on holiday, and let me tell you, that is one high bridge. And that's all I've ever thought about when it comes to BASE jumping.

So he's definitely mad. He's also tempting fate. Calling his set of wings "Icarus Two" is, frankly, a foolish move. Not for the fact that it is hubris of the highest level, but purely because if he fails, I expect his grave to read "Icarus too."

The more observant among you will have noticed that in 'One-Armed Bandit', I opened with the sentence 'The Pentagon is preparing...'. I then followed this, in 'No-Armed Bandit', with 'The Pentagon have...'. As is fairly evident, I can't decide whether the Pentagon should be represented in the singular or the plural. Phrases like 'the government' or 'the Labour party' are similarly troublesome.

With football teams, in England it is plural ('Manchester United are scum'), but in America, singular ('Manchester United is scum'). So should it be the 'Labour party are a ship of fools' and 'the government are not going to win any friends over the dodgy dossier', but 'the Pentagon is one sandwich short of a picnic judging by today's press releases'?

We should be told. Comments please. And yes I know I'm only going to get comments off OJ but hope springs eternal.

The Pentagon have called the whole betting thing off. Obviously someone came into the press room and dragged the monkey away from the typewriter before it could come up with anything else.

The Pentagon is preparing to launch a new online service allowing users access to a kind of futures market entirely devoted to potential terrorist strikes, atrocities, assassinations and the like.

First of all, someone in the Pentagon must have been having a very slow day - instead of screwing around on the back of napkins with diagrams of binladenbet.com, wouldn't it have been more useful to actively employ the talents of the service in simply finding him?

Okay, so I can see some of the advantages. Yes, futures markets do make quite good predictions, and yes the intelligence services need all the help they can get (though with Uday and Qusay, they seemed to have done a fairly good job, possibly aided by large suitcases of cash as a reward). And yet it seems far too gimmicky to ever work, a sort of Hollywood Stock Exchange or Celebdaq for people who read Slate (OJ will be in his element).

Finally, I suspect that this may be the first futures market to encourage insider trading - for example, someone with a Middle Eastern IP address may suddenly speculate to the tune of $2bn that Tony Blair won't live past Wednesday. Oh, and now we know why they made that pack of cards with Iraqi targets on them. They said it was to help troops identify suspects but it was really for the new Pentagon-backed Terror Casino opening in Los Angeles...

~ Pentagon Plans Online Terror Bets [BBC]

Yes, it's that rare beast, a website not designed by me yet involving me. Of course, this has its disadvantages - OJ maintains this slightly unsettling affinity for the spartan black and white look, a notion of which I shall have to disabuse him, and I haven't the slightest idea how this Movable Type thing works. I say bring back Blogger. At least they created their own word for their software instead of just spelling 'Moveable' wrong.

Anyhow, seeing as OJ would appear to have collapsed, exhausted, after a second test post, I am proud to have issued the first proper Dayorama (version 3) post. I am off to work out how to take over this website and bring back my beloved purples and blues, bye for now.

That's test 2, of course, since I deleted the first one.